Macaques and the Mirror Hypothesis

I’ve mentioned the Mirror Hypothesis before: the idea that when we see someone else doing something (like moving their hand), we show neural activity in the hand-moving part of our own brain. Michael Arbib (among others) thinks this was an important step in language because it meant we were then capable of recognising the actions of others and forming joint plans, which is what conversation is all about.

Now a new article about primates and language. They gave macaques PET scans and found that when they hear recordings of other macaques’ calls,

a) they show brain activity in their own calling centres, and

b) the areas correspond to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, two important speech and hearing centres for humans.

Macaque monkeys have a strangely human way of listening to the sounds of their mates, a study has found. When the primates call out to each other they make use of the brain regions used by humans for language processing, the research revealed.
…
Dr James Battey, director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in the US, said: ‘This finding brings us closer to understanding the point at which the building blocks of language appeared on the evolutionary timeline.

‘While the fossil record cannot answer this question for us, we can turn to the here and now – through brain imaging of living non-human primates – for a glimpse into how language, or at least the neural circuitry required for language, came to be.’

Now why is this article filed under ‘weird’? Is it because it has ‘monkey brains’ in the title?